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Universities of the 21st century heavily depend on an efficient IT infrastructure for teaching, research and administration. E-Learning environments, blended learning and all sorts of multimedia and cooperative environments are important requirements for teaching at universities and for further education. Many of the organizational structures such as continuous examinations, interdisciplinary studies, ECTS system and many more require efficient examination administration systems as well as room and personnel management. Research is based on Internet inquiries, eScience, eLibrary and other IT supported media. Research results must be documented and archived in a digital way and results must be distributed and marketed through the Internet. The efficient administration of all kinds of resources of the university must be planned using management support systems. Decisions of university heads must be prepared from well documented statistics and analysis software. In the past, many of the applications named above for teaching, research and administration have been performed by separate software applications and run in distributed environments of universities. Powerful server structures and networking features as well as new software technology like service-oriented architectures make it necessary to recentralize the IT services of the university after a long period of decentralization. Based on metadirectories and unified access procedures, all of the software components must be integrated into a seamless IT infrastructure. To guarantee consistency, data must not be stored in a redundant way. Project IntegraTUM of Technische Universität München started in 2003 and is an umbrella project to define such a seamless IT infrastructure for a university with 22.000 students and approximately 10.000 staff. The talk describes the project, which besides the definition of new technology is based on a fundamental process analysis of the university and many changes in the organizational structure.

Information Supply in the era of mass digitization Drawing on his experience at the Bodleian Library and now at the British Library, Ronald Milne will share his first-hand impressions of 'boutique' and mass digitization programmes, such as those being undertaken by Google and Microsoft, and their effect on information supply. Collections define libraries. What does this mean in the 21st Century? Will all libraries become equal as the digital revolution progresses? What might the digitization and indexing of millions of works mean for university researchers and the intellectually curious more generally? What are the benefits and what are the strategic issues that we are bound to consider?

Information supply is the genuine task of academic institutions as well as of publishers. Publishers profit from copyright provisions which give them exclusive rights in their products. The same copyright provisions are often the limiting factor when academic institutions try to improve their service to the academic community. This is the case in particular when it comes to digital access to information. In a so-called "Second Basket", the German copyright act has just been revised, introducing explicit legal exemptions for document deliveries and on the spot consultation of works contained in public libraries' collections. At the same time, unresolved issues remain with respect to existing legal exemptions as well as the new ones. What will the legal parameters look like for academic institutions once the "Second basket" has been put into force? How can libraries work with these provisions in practice?

Trends for distributed, open, and increasingly collaborative models of information delivery challenge the library's classic roles. In addition, trends within the research community for more interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship create an opportunity for more enabling information infrastructure. In an age of Amazon, Google, and "social" tools, how should the library respond? My presentation will focus on strategies for bringing the library's "assets" into the flow of researchers' work. How can the library integrate its resources into the scholar's workflow? What are the emerging challenges of this integration?

Rather than introducing a new system for global identity management, the University of Freiburg decided to continue with the existing software systems (esp. from HIS), to identify the leading system for each set of data and to mirror the data between the various systems. A clearly defined workflow ensures that changes to data are made only on the relevant "leading" system and then propagated to the other systems. User authentication for systems managed by the computer center is done via LDAP. Consequently, while access rights are granted by the LDAP system, the decision of whether or not the person is a member of the University is left to the administration. As a consequence the implementation of a portal called mylogin to get the necessary tickets for shibboleth is a straightforward process as it only remains to check the data against LDAP before issueing the corresponding tickets.

The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Alliance is an international community of about 100 libraries and partners like OCLC. For almost a decade the LOCKSS open source model has been tested for its robustness against attack and for its ability to migrate formats. LOCKSS »boxes« at 150 institutions in more than 20 countries comprise a peer-to-peer system that automatically cross-checks content to ensure the accuracy and completeness of all member archives. Eighty publishers, including large publishers like Oxford University Press, are now participating in LOCKSS or actively preparing to add their journals to the program.

The mission of the Harvard Judaica Collection is to comprehensively document Jewish history and civilization in all places and periods. To accomplish its mission, the Judaica Collection collects materials in all languages and in all formats—books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, sound recordings, and videos, posters, broadsides, and photographs. A particular focus is the Library’s Documenting Israel program, which covers all aspects of Israeli life and culture in great depth; Harvard has the largest collection of Israeli publications and Israel-related materials outside the State of Israel. The Harvard Judaica Collection also attempts to have comprehensive coverage of the publications of Jewish communities throughout the globe, including a significant collection of publications from countries across Europe. Collecting these materials requires cooperation with a wide array of institutions and individuals around the world.

To stimulate further discussion, I would like to briefly tackle the following questions: * How can one become informed about what is going on in German Studies in the US? * What kinds of American guides to German resources are available? * What kinds of German Studies resources are being produced in the US? * What do we know about how scholars are using (or not) these guides and resources?